No person’s life conforms to the neat three-act structure that seems foundational to the Hollywood biopic. But that hasn’t stopped countless films, from Ray to Walk the Line to Bohemian Rhapsody, from attempting to compress the vast, unaccountable messiness of a musical artist’s life into the neatest and tidiest of boxes. Liesl Tommy’s Respect, which tackles the career of soul legend Aretha Franklin (Jennifer Hudson), doesn’t quite break free of the stultifying conventions of its format, but it does intermittently bring an unexpected and welcome nuance to the process of mythmaking that so often powers the biopic.
That’s a particularly tall order given that the film’s subject has been practically canonized for decades. Even before her death in 2018, Aretha was often regarded less as a living, breathing human being than as a kind of divine presence, embodying all that’s good and true about American popular music. Depicting her tumultuous and tragic early years with a particular eye toward the singer’s fraught, conflicted relationship with her Baptist minister father, C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), Respect manages to bring this R&B deity back down to Earth.
Aretha is presented as a singular talent from a very young age—we first see her at age 10 (played by Skye Dakota Turner) performing a scatty jazz tune at one of her fathers’ raucous house parties—but one who took several years to figure out who she really is. That’s because her development as an artist and as a person was manipulated by controlling men—first by her father, who forced her into recording soulless pop tunes and jazz standards that poorly suited her soaring vocal talent, and then by her first husband and manager, Ted White (Marlon Wayans), whose brashness and jealousy threatened to derail her career. Tracey Scott Wilson’s screenplay smartly delineates the way in which Aretha’s attempt to free herself from C.L.’s domineering respectability politics leads her into the arms of Ted, whose disreputable hustler lifestyle seems to offer liberation but quickly gives way to jealously and abuse.
Hudson is tasked with the exceedingly difficult challenge of portraying one of the most iconic superstars of the past century while also conveying the sense that Aretha doesn’t truly know who she wants to be. Hudson’s renditions of Aretha’s iconic vocal performances are exhilaratingly soulful, but her non-musical performance is just as impressive, particularly given the showboating standards of most biopic leads. Hudson’s turn is surprisingly insular, conveying a palpable sense of self-doubt that cuts against the stereotypical image of Aretha as a brassy prima donna—though once the singer hits the big time, Hudson gets a chance to do the preening diva routine as well, complete with the requisite booze-addled meltdown.
The film makes a strong case for Aretha as not merely a great vocalist but a consummate musical virtuoso with an intuitive understanding of the structure and soul of R&B and gospel. Scenes of Aretha working out tracks like “Respect” and “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” with session players at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, depict her as a directive creative force, adept at taking a tune written by someone else and making it wholly her own. Unlike similar sequences in Bohemian Rhapsody, which turn recording-session trivia into glib little gags, Respect truly immerses us in the creative process.
There’s a liveliness and bounce to these scenes that’s unfortunately sorely lacking from much of the rest of the film. For all of its thoughtfulness and attempts at nuance, Respect never quite shakes that it’s casting too wide a net, as evinced by the scenes in which characters shout exposition-laden speeches at each other in conspicuous attempts to compress time and fill in gaps about Aretha’s life. The film touches on Aretha’s involvement in civil rights, her strained relationship with her children, and her rape and impregnation at the age of 12, but it doesn’t have the focus to do much of anything with these topics beyond bringing them up.
It’s often hard not to feel like the film is simply checking off boxes, a quality that’s exacerbated by Tommy’s flat direction, which lends a generic affectlessness to practically every scene in which Hudson, not so much approximating Aretha’s voice as channeling her soul, isn’t singing her heart out. But when she is, as in the towering rendition of “Amazing Grace” that closes the film, the effect is transportive: All the narrative clutter seems to clear away, and the blandly functionalist mise-en-scène momentarily seems to brighten. Having brought Aretha back down to Earth, in these final moments, Respect delivers her back to the heavens.
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